Beginners' Contest August is now over. With the new categorization, it looks like more people wanted to submit the answers and be competitive among fellow Beginners. Whether that be the reason or not, this month's contest saw a high ratio of people who solved at least one sudoku (293/332 Compared to 204/314). This is quite a pleasing stat as the main aim of these contests is that everyone should be able to solve something within the given competitive time.

As this test was categorized, here are the stats on each side -

Beginners - 164 participants and 136 of them solved at least one sudoku. 16 of them solved all 8 correctly.
Seasoners - 167 participants and 157 of them solved at least one sudoku. 96 of them solved all 8 correctly.

Now to the winners,

Congratulations to zyx (Thailand), Manuj (India) and PMarlin (USA) for being the top 3 Beginners.

Among the Seasoners, f4han (Malaysia), jaku111 (Czech Republic) and janoslaw (Poland) were the top 3.

Some of the winners from the Beginners Contest will get shifted to the Seasoner category after this as posted before. They can now try the LMI monthly tests and use the future Beginners' Contests as practice to continue their move towards the top, as they have excelled at the Beginner level. This means some of the other Beginners have a chance of winning the next edition.

I'm not exactly sure what 'offline' means.
You can either solve online using the flash interface
OR
you can print (the same set of sudokus) on paper and solve on paper, and then enter the rows marked by arrows.

abhi5670 - 2012-09-06 3:46 PM

If I solve the sudoku puzzles within time for the beginners contest, do I get a rank or somethign?

Again, not sure what your question is about. What exactly are you expecting if you solve the sudokus within time?

If I solve the sudoku puzzles within time for the beginners contest, do I get a rank or somethign?

See the previous scoring pages. You'll get "a rank" no matter how many you solve, as long as you participate. You'll get "a better rank" if you finish more sudokus/finish the same number faster. But on a side note, if you forget about the ranks, you invariably end up enjoying the test and giving a good performance too ;)

The following are Seasoners by default -
1. Those who have attained, at any point, an LMI Sudoku rating of 500+.
2. Those who have achieved a rank of 25 or better in an LMI monthly Sudoku test.
3. Those who get 2 75+ total scores in the Beginners' Contests(This can obviously take effect only from the September edition).
4. Those who score 100+ on the Beginners' Contest shall be bumped to Seasoner level on the spot.

Following players are moved to Seasoners because of 3, even if they chose to play as beginner in August
B. Thananon
godisdead
jzverina
manuj
ZYX

This is a restricted thread. As you might have seen during other LMI tests :

Comments posted in the thread after the test started can only be viewed by players who have finished the test. If you are not logged in to forum or if you have not finished the test, you will see first few characters of the post.

The purpose is to encourage players to freely post comments while the test is running.

One of the main points of the Beginners' Contests IS to give practice to beginners in Sudoku variants. If you meant solving tips, etc. there is no extensive covering of all variants as far as I know, so if you post a specific grid, one of us will surely give you the required tricks and pushes to solve it.

This was another wonderful attempt by LMI to encourage beginners in the puzzling world in general and sudoku in particular......
The classics were of easy / medium difficulty. 11 pointer was slightly difficult. As regards variants.....
I loved the non-consecutive..........odd was difficult and deserved more points than 11..........
all the best to all the solvers....

fellas is there any sure shot of improving speed in sudoku ? because i have been solving sudokus for the past 2-3 months extensively after becoming a member of LMI compared to the number of sudokus i used to do earlier and still i am unable to increase my speed by as much as i would have liked and when i see people here submitting 4 classic sudokus within 5mins 26 secs !!!!!!!!!!(oh my god )under 10 mins and so on i feel as i m missing the picture somewhere?!..or is there something that needs to kept in mind as a pre-requisite while solving sudokus????how do people solve within 10 mins 4 sudokus effectively completing each sudoku be it easy or hard under 150 seconds...share ur thoughts pls .....

fellas is there any sure shot of improving speed in sudoku ? because i have been solving sudokus for the past 2-3 months extensively after becoming a member of LMI compared to the number of sudokus i used to do earlier and still i am unable to increase my speed by as much as i would have liked and when i see people here submitting 4 classic sudokus within 5mins 26 secs !!!!!!!!!!(oh my god )under 10 mins and so on i feel as i m missing the picture somewhere?!..or is there something that needs to kept in mind as a pre-requisite while solving sudokus????how do people solve within 10 mins 4 sudokus effectively completing each sudoku be it easy or hard under 150 seconds...share ur thoughts pls .....

In any competition, there will be different levels of ability. This doesn't mean one can't improve. The 5 min 26 seconds person you mention has been a top solver for many years, so not getting anywhere near that after 2-3 months of practice shouldn't be a surprise right? In any case, thats what the Beginners-Seasoners categories are for. Different people have different growth patterns in terms of improving solving speed. That is the base of competition.

There isn't any sure shot way of improving your speed other than practicing as far as I know. There are certain techniques, like the ones listed here - http://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudoku.htm , but its up to you to learn how to use them with time.